16TH ANNUAL GREENWICH GALA AUCTION PREVIEW

STEVE ALPERT: SALUTE

After all these years this painting has taken on a greater meaning to me.  As a high school junior in 1968, I asked my local congressman to initiate the process to receive an appointment to West Point. In 1968, 17,000 American men in uniform were sent home in body bags.  A few weeks after I visited my Congressman a statistic was published: the average life span of a West Point graduate 2nd LT in-country was less than three weeks. My father, a WWII veteran, and I decided this might not be the right time for me to do this.  I withdrew the request.

It is my greatest regret that I did not serve in uniform. On a hot summer day in 1985, I stumbled upon the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington DC.  I was overwhelmed by the enormity and power of all those names etched in black granite.  I broke down, hunched down on the ground, and began sobbing uncontrollably.  Underneath me, my tears grew a puddle, as people stepped over and around me.  All those souls who left their lives in Vietnam. The anguish for their families, their friends.  I did not know one name on that wall, and yet I regretted that my name was not up there. It damn well could have been. I missed serving in that war.  It missed me.

Fate assigned me a high lottery number and I went to college under the 2-S college deferment. Graduating in 1973, the war was winding down. By then I had become very much against that war.  I still don’t know how to mitigate the phrase I often heard from my father’s generation who said, “My country right or wrong.  When your country calls you, you go.”  The generation gap was a real thing and tore this country apart.
That day at the wall planted a seed in my soul, a seed that lay dormant until September 11th, 2001 when it  took root deep inside of me.
             
In 2003 I painted a large painting of a Blackhawk helicopter in honor of the seventeen soldiers lost in a mid-air collision over Mosul, Iraq.  That single painting was the first of dozens of paintings I created over the last twenty-four years honoring our men and women in uniform. After a visit to four wounded warriors at Walter Reed, I learned the paintings could raise funds for not-for-profit veteran service organizations.  It gave my life powerful purpose and a mission to repay the debt I felt I owed.  Years ago, a gallery owner asked me, “…And when does this debt get paid off?”  Before I could even think, I said, “Never.”

In 2017, a friend called me from a street corner in Greenwich, CT saying he had seen a truck with Children of Fallen Patriots painted all over it with an 800 number. He said, “You gotta call them…” I did, and thus began my love affair with the mission of Fallen Patriots.

Salute honors all those who served in Vietnam. They did their duty. They were not welcomed home. No, they were reviled and cruelly and tragically maligned. They were told not to wear their uniforms when they came home.  Those who refused were spat upon, verbally shamed, and worse — ignored.  A dark stain on our history. 

And so, we owe our Vietnam veterans the love and respect and honor that was denied them.  To me, Salute embodies but a small debt of gratitude for all the courageous men and women who served in the Vietnam War.  May God Bless them all.